"I Wanted to Go Weirder"

Singer-songwriter Grace Potter is putting a new spin on rootsy Americana – with famous friends, oddball gear and a borrowed vintage Martin she wanted to steal…

- By Jonathan Horsley

The drive from Fayston, Vermont, to Topanga Valley, California, spans the breadth of the continental USA and clocks in just shy of 3,000 miles. It'll take around 44 hours behind the wheel, plenty of time to do some thinking. Ask Grace Potter - she's been there, done that.

It's where her new solo studio album, Mother Road, first started coming together, not that she knew it at the time as she wrestled a big ol' fold-out Rand McNally Road Atlas, marking the route with a Sharpie. There were no melody lines hummed into an iPhone. Grace had more pressing things on her mind, such as the car itself, a 2020 VW Atlas, that she swears was trying to kill her. "It was a lemon," she says. "The electrics on the inside were f*cking up, making me accelerate randomly. Something had gone wrong in the wiring in that car and I almost died."

She upgraded the Atlas to a 2021 model for the return leg of the journey but all this forward motion - maybe the danger, too - was doing her good. She was putting some distance between her and her problems, getting the head straight. "I genuinely needed it," she recalls. "I desperately needed that road, the amalgamation of heart and soul, and movement and stillness all at once, that I can only achieve all at once when I am out on the road."

There was also a material reason for these epic shuttle runs. She was grabbing gear - guitars, recording consoles, microphones - from her home in Topanga, taking it back to her farm in Vermont. Back on the farm, her husband, the producer Eric Valentine, had the soldering iron running hot, restoring an old 1954 RCA broadcasting console he planned to use on studio sessions. More on that shortly.